Many impurities are present in the oil fractions and the oil residue obtained from the crude oil that serves as the starting material. Therefore, in the hydrogenation process that is normally carried out as a later process on these oil fractions and oil residue, currently, hydrorefining is carried out under severe reactive conditions at high temperature and high pressure in order to eliminate these impurities, and thereby a large amount of catalyst is consumed.
However, when carrying out this hydrogenation process under severe conditions, naturally there are the drawbacks that a great deal time and cost are involved in the maintenance of this process unit and that the catalyst life of the process is short. In addition, it becomes difficult to produce flexibly various types of oil products according to their objective.
In consideration of the circumstances described above, it is an object of the present invention to provide a heavy oil refining method and a heavy oil refining facility wherein the hydrogenation process can be carried out under comparatively mild conditions, and thereby, various types of oil products according to their objective and intermediate oil products can be flexibly produced.